Naylor Votes 'Yes' On Viewable Imps; Klout Ties Up With Microsoft

Brand campaign-focused ad industry professionals have been complaining about clickthroughs as a lousy metric for premium marketing. Engagement is the buzzword, but how to measure it in a way everyone agrees is has been the problematic response. Peter Naylor, EVP, Digital Media Sales for NBCUniversal (and IAB Chairman), casts his vote for viewable impressions as the new standard for figuring out a placement's value. "When advertisers know their ads are visible, when they see a rise in performance, when we have conversations based on the reality that there is a finite amount of valuable advertising space online, and when we are able to make apples-to-apples comparisons with other media that rely on viewability measures, advertiser confidence in buying display ads increases," he writes in Ad Age. Read more.

Eye On Mobile Ads

A feature article in The Wall Street Journal looks at the different ways mobile advertising is being implemented today by marketers. The WSJ concludes, "Marketers and ad-dependent companies said banner ads are an inevitable first step in a new ad medium, just as the first wave of the Internet was dominated by now notorious pop-up and 'dancing cowboy' ads." Dancing cowboy? It was "Shoot the Monkey!" Read more (subscription).

Klout's Audience Platform

Microsoft will bring Bing search data to Klout's "audience platform" of influencers, as part of as part of a strategic investment in the company. Klout CEO Joe Fernandez writes in a blog post, "Search data has long been one of the missing signals in our effort to fully recognize a person's influence. Just as Wikipedia articles can reflect a person's real world influence, search results for a person signal accomplishments achieved beyond social networks and serve to influence others... This is a small step for Bing and Klout towards a very big idea: search through people." Read it.

The Wrong Incentive?

Competition must be getting pretty tense among ad networks these days. How else to explain SocialVibe's attempt to entice new clients with a raffle? As Digiday's Jack Marshall reports, the social ad network offered media buyers who share their contact info with them the chance to win a free first class trip to Las Vegas, where they would stay at a penthouse suite, all expenses paid. SocialVibe CMO John Capano defended the offer, saying, "It's just a lead-gen campaign… We don't do any of the Hamptons houses or anything like that, and we're very much against it. We draw the line at pens and beer koozies, and taking clients to dinner."

The Publisher Fix

Yieldbot CEO Jonathan Mendez makes a pitch on the company's blog and doesn't mince words about the publisher predicament today. He writes, "What we're seeing from Yahoo is representative of the change that Publishers must make in order to survive. Bringing in one of the sharpest minds on Search as CEO to help save the struggling web banner company should be a beacon to all publishers. Your business is a utility. You deliver valuable content. That includes advertising. The value of that advertising is based on the quality of your audience to the advertiser as measured by a performance metric..." Read more.

Patience Over Innovation

The problems affecting digital media and advertising is not that there's too little innovation. It's that there's too little patience with the pace of it. So says Rob Norman, Global Chief Digital Officer for WPP's GroupM, who tells The Makegood's Matt Straz: "Our clients operate at scale and innovation is only relevant if it has the potential to make a difference to business results…This is no insurance against failure but it is insurance against passing on long term opportunities because of short term disappointment." Read the rest.

Retargeting Upgrade

The world has left "Retargeting 1.0" behind, writes Eric Porres in iMediaConnection. What's 2.0? For starters, oh so dynamic. "Technologies analyze prospect's behavior: how many times they've seen an ad, whether they've responded, and how they've responded." Prospects are grouped and regrouped into categories based on their real-time actions. Read more.

Publishers: Agencies Have Attitude

UK-based Association of Online Publishers (AOP) said earlier this week that according to results of its latest survey agencies aren't helping publishers' mobile cause. From the AOP's site, "Nearly twice as many respondents to the Census said agency attitude rather than audience size would hold back mobile revenue growth next year, cited by 55% and 31% respectively. Dependency on low-yield ad networks would also hamper growth, according to 52%." Read more.